A high quality speaker cable from new-comer Monkey Cable

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Our Verdict

For

Against

Monkey Cable is a new cable brand with a strong emphasis in the manufacturer's literature on AV cables (especially HDMI), but the range also includes several dedicated audio cables.

There are two speaker cables, of which the Silverback is the cheaper one, priced per metre but available terminated in Monkey's own 4mm plugs at £6 per pair including fitting.

It's a simple, classic figure-eight design with two identical conductors, each 4mm in diameter overall, zipped together in a clear plastic insulation.

The conductors are made of silver-plated copper, quite deluxe at this price, which is braided together in three separate layers over a non-conducting core, something we've seen once or twice before, most memorably in the QED 'X-Tube' series.

Sound quality

We found this cable quite exciting in terms of both rhythm and bass, the latter having plenty of extension and very good attack indeed.

The rhythmic aspect is helped by a lively sound, but this seems to come at some expense of subtlety and precision and at times this cable can make a system sound almost coarse. It's a classic budget-cable compromise, in fact, with sound that's out-of-class with respect to pace and timing, but lacking insight.

The latter is most obviously a drawback if your tastes run to multi-layered music: we found some music for choir and orchestra rather hard to follow because of minor but perceptible smudging and smearing between strands, but with energetic rock tracks we just loved the excitement this cable brings to the music.